Rum Revival

Once overlooked by connoisseurs, rum has been revitalized by quality craftsmanship and superpremium brands that have put the sugary spirit back on the top shelf

It takes only about three swings with a machete to recognize that I have no future as a
harvester of sugarcane. I'm too tall, too fragile of back and too soft to last long in the cane
fields of Guatemala, unlike the squat Mayan experts around me this morning, who can hack through
40 acres a day, 100 tons in an hour, to feed the inexhaustible sugar needs of the exploding rum
market. I've come to the hilly spine of Central America to witness the process of rum making,
from cane to case, with Rones de Guatemala, the maker of the hot superpremium brand Ron Zacapa, as
well as other rums, as my guide.

Happily, this journey has taught me about more than just my level of ineptitude. I reached this
field by helicopter, viewing from above the lava flows that carve out the earth and bring rich
volcanic soil to the sugarcane fields below. Harvesting sugarcane is the all-important first step
in rum making and one that is essential to understanding what is behind the current resurrection
of the rum market, which has lifted the once ill-considered spirit to a choice position among
connoisseurs of fine spirits and esteemed mixologists alike. The public is taking notice as well,
as domestic rum consumption almost doubled from 1995 to 2006, from 12 million cases to an
estimated 23 million. Per capita consumption also leapt, from 0.6 liters a person to 0.9.

During harvest, from late winter through spring, it's easy to spot the cane fields among the
crops of Guatemala. Just look for smoke and birds circling overhead. The harvest starts when a man
with a flamethrower walks through the fields, burning the foliage off the cane and leaving nothing
but the stalks filled with sweet sap. Hawks soar above, making easy prey of the mice and other
vermin that inevitably flee the fire. The reapers make quick work of what still stands, slicing
the stalks with special machetes that have their blades angled at 90 degrees from the handle to
make it easier to cut from ground level. It's dirty work and everyone is soon covered in soot.

I wipe my hands with a moist towelette and inquire if some kind of machine couldn't do this
more easily. The answer is it could, but the rum would suffer. That explanation becomes a lot
clearer only a few miles away at Ingenio Tululó, the sugar mill owned by Ron Zacapa's parent
company. Huge trucks are dumping the cane into a series of machines that chop it up with blades
and press it with rollers until an amber juice is expressed. Put a magnifying glass to that liquid
and you can see tiny white crystals floating in it. This is the sugary essence of rum—74 percent
virgin sugar juice, to be exact. Cutting the cane by hand is an important part of that outcome as
it allows for chopping close to the ground, where much the of sugar concentrates, while avoiding
picking up soil and other impurities that would adulterate the juice.

See this process or talk to any of the top rum makers and you understand the passion that is
making the world take another look at a liquor that was once widely dismissed. In years gone by,
rum was, at best, a drink you enjoyed on a Caribbean vacation, served in a fruity punch with an
umbrella. At worst, it was disparaged with terms such as rotgut, kill devil or grog. Only a few
recognized the level of connoisseurship that rum could reach when treated with respect.

That perception is changing with the emergence of superquality spirits that emphasize fine raw
materials and artisanal processes. Rums with cane pedigrees, super aging, unusual maturation
processes, special bottlings and artful distillation processes are now making their way to the top
shelves of better bars and liquor stores. It's a process that mirrors the leap that Tequila has
made in recent years, and just as the Margarita has driven that drink, so too does rum have its
cocktail of the moment: the Mojito.

Like Tequila, the premiership of rum is happening across its product spectrum, from dark to golden and light rums.

Also like Tequila, the premiership of rum is happening across its product spectrum, from dark
to golden and light rums. This may be something of an anomaly since many believe that much of the
flavor of great spirits comes from aging in wood. But two years ago, when Moët Hennessy's newly
created wine and spirits division launched its first product, it went with a light rum: 10 Cane.
With it came the bold pronouncement that 10 Cane was "rum's redemption." Named for the number of
stalks traditionally placed in a bundle of cane, the spirit seemed to celebrate the front end of
the rum-making process, with less emphasis on the aging (about six months in French oak). It
touted the sublime result of hand harvesting, use of the first pressing of Trinidadian cane and
distillation in special pot stills designed after the ones Hennessy uses to make Cognac. When 10
Cane debuted, Jean Pineau, the Hennessy master distiller who was charged with creating it,
explained that after sucking on a piece of cut cane, he was inspired to celebrate the raw sugar
juice in his rum.

It is not the only rum to take a lighter approach to the spirit recently. After Bacardi
struggled for years in court for the right to bottle a rum under the name Havana Club, which had
been expropriated from the Arechabala family during the Cuban revolution, it chose to market the
brand as a light rum. While the Cuban Havana Club familiar to shoppers in duty-free stores may be
amber, Bacardi went with a perfectly clear Puerto Rican version for the U.S. market, says vice
president John H. Gomez, because "premium white spirits are on trend with consumers for their
mixability and chicness." The aim for the new product, according to Gomez, is to provide "the best
of both worlds"—the mixability of white rum and the body and rounded characteristics of aged
rum.

Montecristo, which debuted in 2002 with a 12-year-old "super-aged" rum seemingly aimed at
pairing with cigars, introduced its Platinum blend last year (both blends are made by Rones de
Guatemala.) The Tommy Bahama brand, so emblematic of the tropics, is now on statuesque rum
bottles—both light and gold—imported by the company that drove Grey Goose to the top of the vodka
shelf. Michael Frey, of Montecristo, and Olivier Bugat, of Tommy Bahama, concur with Gomez: the
high end of the market demands light rum.

One renowned brand, Bermuda's Gosling's, has gone in two directions from its signature
blackstrap molasses rum, the main ingredient in a Dark 'n' Stormy cocktail. It released a golden
rum as a nod to the public's taste for lighter spirit, as well as Gosling's Old Rum.

Another recent light rum comes from beverage giant Diageo, which also imports Pampero, one of
the best aged rums in the spirits firmament. Oronoco is made by the Bastos Ribeiro brothers,
Vicente and Roberto. They also make cachaça, a Brazilian sugar spirit that is developing some
currency. In developing rum aimed at mixability and not intended for great age, Vicente considered
two important aspects: the location of the sugarcane fields and the freshness of the juice. He
sourced his cane from the slopes of Brazil's mountains, he says, where dry soil with good drainage
creates low yields but intense flavor, much the same as the conditions that affect wine-grape
growers. While high-altitude growing may not be universally adored (Zacapa and Flor de Caña of
Nicaragua swear by volcanic soil), the proximity of the fields to milling facilities—or "kill to
mill"—is a common strategy. Vicente points out that waiting more than 24 hours to crush the cane
invites bacteria and unwanted volunteer yeast that comes from the air.

Yeast is the microscopic fungal organism that devours sugars and expels them as alcohol. It is
responsible for starting the fermentation process used in making every alcoholic beverage, from
beer and wine to distilled spirits. While the carbohydrates found in starchy grain beverages are
more complex, the simple sugars in cane offer themselves up readily to yeast. A few rums are
allowed to ferment in wild yeast, but most modern distillers prefer rigid control and have
developed proprietary yeasts to that end. The strain used in Ron Zacapa has been the same for 45
years, being regenerated every six months.

Jorge Marcano, Bacardi's vice president of operations, stresses the importance of its yeast
strains to the world's largest rum producer and its ability to create a consistent product. Don
Facundo Bacardi Massó, who founded the company in 1862, is credited with making great strides in
taming the volatility of rum and creating a mellow, smooth light rum worth drinking. His son
Facundo applied modern science to the process, and one of his important innovations was the
isolation of yeast strains specific to his style of rum.

Joy Spence, the master blender of Appleton Estate Rum, feels that faster working yeast is
better for light rums and that slower acting yeast is more appropriate for the more full-bodied
rums that she makes in Jamaica. The specially cultured yeast that Appleton uses contributes
particularly to the top notes of the rum, she says. Appleton makes a spectrum of rums, the oldest
being a 21-year-old, and it is telling to hear Spence wax forth about the critical importance of
the yeast and the spring water, which passes through the limestone hills of the estate. "We don't
wait until the end and say something went wrong here."

A by-product of fermentation is carbon dioxide, which the Zacapa mill captures and uses for
soda drinks. The rum industry may be one of the greenest in the spirits world. Not much goes to
waste here. The sawdust from the crushed cane is used to power a generator that runs the plant.
The muddy residue left after the sugar juice is extracted is used for fertilizer in local farms.
Ron Zacapa is not alone. Bacardi captures methane to help run its distillery. Four Square in
Barbados, which makes the Tommy Bahama rums, and the Flor de Caña distillery also recycle CO2 for
soda as well as dry ice.

Fermentation for Ron Zacapa takes place over a period of five days, in 40,000-gallon tanks that
yield a low-proof liquid called a wash, or wine. Appleton ferments in 36 hours, using molasses as
a base rather than sugar juice. Rums can be fermented in as little as 24 hours. As a rule, the
longer the fermentation, the fuller the body of the rum.

Zacapa's use of sugar juice, or honey, is a rum-making technique that is currently very
popular. Oronoco and 10 Cane, as well as cachaça, are made in the same way, but molasses, a
by-product of making crystallized sugar, is the traditional base for rum and by far the better
represented. In the days of the infamous triangle trade routes of the eighteenth century, molasses
was shipped from Caribbean sugar mills to New England, where it was made into rum that was sent to
Africa and traded for slaves, who were then sold in the Caribbean. The use of crushed cane juice
was pioneered in the French islands, particularly Martinique, where there is a prescribed
appellation system for this rhum agricole, or agricultural rum. Rhum Barbancourt is a well-known
example. Another is Rhum Clement, which seems to nod to its French roots with designations such as
VSOP and XO and a bottle design that seems to be straight out of Cognac.

Of course, not everyone agrees that forgoing molasses is an improvement. Mount Gay, having
celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2003, is the world's oldest rum and has always been made with
molasses. Todd Schuessler, the brand manager, looks at rhum agricole as something of a trend and
points to the long tradition of celebrating the sugarcane crop in Barbados, where Mount Gay is
made, as proof of the legitimacy of molasses as a rum base. "We stand by our laurels as far as
taste and quality." Robert Collins, who represents Flor de Caña in the United States, is similarly
unapologetic about the use of molasses: "There is an obsession for quality that is coming out of
that distillery [in Nicaraga] and molassses is part of it."

Schuessler, however, says he applauds the rum variants and the new high-end entries that are
helping the rum market as a whole, by drawing attention to it. "It's very exciting for all the
players because for years rum had a sort of commodity rap. Now, you're seeing the same things you
saw with Tequila."

In Puerto Rico, which produces 70 percent of all the rum sold in the United States, all the
brands are molasses based. Among them are Castillo, Ron del Barrilito, Captain Morgan and, of
course, Bacardi, which was a product of Cuba until that country's revolution forced the company to
relocate.

Marcano says that Bacardi's position as the world's biggest customer of molasses for premium
rum production—it buys 200,000 tons a year—puts the company in a position to demand very high
standards of purity and sugar concentration. "The better the molasses is," he says, "the easier it
is to work with." Bacardi buys from a coterie of longtime suppliers throughout the sugarcane
region of the Caribbean and South America. To ensure a minimum of impurities, called ash, the cane
from which Bacardi's molasses is made is often cut by hand and milled within 24 hours to avoid
wild yeast. Bacardi aims for a sugar content of 54 percent, although rum can be fermented from a
52 percent concentration.

The result of fermenting sugar juice or molasses is a low-proof wine, typically between 8 and
12 percent alcohol. The next step is to distill it to concentrate the alcohol. Distillation is
basically a process of steaming off the alcohol from the watery wash, at a temperature below the
boiling point of water. For Ron Zacapa, this is done in a column still, a huge, towering
contraption that distills very efficiently, leaving very little impurity in the form of fusel
oils. A column still, which was first used in making British Isle whiskies, was one of the
innovations that the elder Bacardi first used in purifying his rum.

As with all things rum, disagreement exists here. Because rum is made throughout the world—in
Europe, Asia, Australia, even Tennessee—there are no production standards other than the loose
dictum that it be made from some sugar product. This laissez-faire attitude extends to
distillation, which may include different types of column stills, pot stills and combinations
thereof. While the pot type is the simplest of stills and renders the most impurities, it is still
highly prized for some of the flavor notes comprised within its walls. The trick is to capture the
center slice of the batch as it comes off the still. The first and last parts of the rum contain
the most impurities, some of which not only taste bad but cause hangovers and worse.

Sea Wynde, a rum from Jamaica and Guyana, is made entirely in pot stills. Barbancourt uses a
French alembic similar to a pot still. Mount Gay and Appleton both use column and pot stills and
then blend the results after aging. While full body in rum is often listed as a result of the use
of pot stills, that notion is belied by rich rums like Zacapa, Venezuela's Pampero, Nicaragua's
Flor de Caña and Bacardi 8, all pure column-stilled rums.

To understand why that happens, it is necessary to consider rum's aging. If you were to
generalize about rum at all, it might be said that rum is aged in hot climes that cause it to
mature very quickly. Some say that a year of rum aging in the sultry Caribbean is equal to four to
six years for malt in chilly Scotland. The superheat causes the rum to expand into the barrel
staves during the day and steal their flavor when it returns inside during cool nights. A similar
process happens to Bourbon aged in Kentucky, where the summers are torrid and the winters
cool.

Further, because the barrels used for aging are typically salvaged from the Bourbon industry,
where they are legally only allowed to be used once, the rum often borrows the rounded vanilla and
maple notes of the whiskey that once occupied the containers. Hence, even column-stilled rum can
become very full-bodied in a short amount of time.

But what of Ron Zacapa? Wouldn't its average of 23 years of aging make it the equivalent of
something like 100 years old in rum years? To understand why drinking it isn't like sucking on
wood chips, I went to Quetzaltenango, at an elevation of some 7,650 feet, to see it being aged. At
that altitude, Guatemala is no longer stuck in a tropical heat wave, but feels more like a spring
day and a world away from the hurry-up-and-get-old temperatures that age many a Caribbean rum.
Again, rum resists absolutes: Flor de Caña, also of Central America, manages to age some rum for
18 years at sea level.

At least one employee at the aging plant must be very thankful to be in this setting. He is the
cooper whose job it is to assemble barrels shipped from Kentucky and other locations. The barrels
come as a package of staves that are puzzled back together and made watertight with tule, a
lake-growing bulrush, stuffed between them. (That plant is also used in the distinctive weave
decoration on Zacapa bottles.) The cooper, wearing something akin to a fire-retardant spacesuit,
blasts the insides with flames. It's hot work even at this altitude.

The rum ages here by the solera method, in which the spirits are transitioned through a series
of barrels, allowing different ages to meld together. Ron Matusalem, a Cuban-style rum from the
Dominican Republic, also uses the solera method, although for a shorter period, because of the
hotter climes in which it rests. Every premium has its own unique aging methods that set it apart
from the rest. Flor de Caña fills smallish (180-liter) barrels that have only been used once.
French wood is used for 10 Cane. When Bacardi did a Millennium edition of Bacardi 8, it finished
the rum for six months in sherry barrels, following a practice that has become quite popular with
single-malt Scotches. Cruzan, of Saint Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, makes what it calls
Single Barrel Estate Rum. Not the product of spirit from only one barrel, rather it marries
different rums to be further matured in a single barrel, from which it is bottled at cask
strength.

After aging, the final process before the rum goes into the bottle is to blend it. This is a
daunting art in itself, as the blenders must nail the same flavor profile from batch to batch.
Claiming age designations after blending is not as strict as in the Scotch and Bourbon worlds,
where the youngest whiskey in the bottle marks its maturity. Rum makers typically average the ages
of the rum. They also are allowed to color the spirit, which Scotch makers can do, but Bourbon
makers cannot. This can be confusing, as dark color is by no means an indication of age. It is,
however, something of a cosmetic necessity as the spirit doesn't color consistently on its own
very well. As mentioned earlier, many light rums have had the benefit of barrel age, but they
don't show it particularly well.

Rum, much like vodka, may also be flavored, and that has become a thrust in the market as well,
one in which Bacardi has become a major player. But even as it pursues the fashions of taste, it
perseveres in its commitment to premium quaffs. That is one of the aspects setting rum apart from
many spirits: the spectrums of tastes and quality levels span from fun, light spirits to the now
more appreciated connoisseur rums.

"It's become sophisticated," says Mount Gay's Schuessler. "People see it doesn't just belong in
a drink with an umbrella. It's a bigger world of possibilities in a glass."

All Mixed UpWhat do you do after you've savored some of the world's best sipping rum? Make cocktails!

Bacardi
Bacardi Cocktail
The recipe calls for light, but why not use its best expression for its namesake cocktail.
2 oz. Bacardi 8
1 oz. lime juice
1 tsp. grenadine
Shake ingredients over ice in a shaker and strain into a cocktail glass.

Tommy Bahama
Velvet Rosa
Tommy brings Champagne to his rum.
2/3 part Tommy Bahama White Sand Rum
1/3 part peach schnapps
1 part cranberry juice
Champagne
Put all ingredients, except the Champagne, into a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake quickly. Strain
into a chilled glass and top up with Champagne. Stir quickly to bring the effervescence into
play. Garnish with a small, delicate flower.